While
Obama talks of putting America on the path to a clean, green future,
we're flooding world markets with cheap, high carbon fuels

The
greening of American energy is both real and profound. Since President
Obama took office, the nation's solar capacity has increased more than
tenfold. Wind power has more than doubled, to 60,000 megawatts – enough
to power nearly 20 million homes. Thanks to aggressive new
fuel-efficiency standards, the nation's drivers are burning nearly 5
billion fewer gallons of gasoline a year than in 2008. The boom in cheap
natural gas, meanwhile, has disrupted the coal industry. Coal-power
generation, though still the nation's top source of electricity, is off
nearly 20 percent since 2008. More than 150 coal plants have already
been shuttered, and the EPA is expected to issue regulations in June
that will limit emissions from existing coal facilities. These rules
should accelerate the shift to natural gas, which – fracking's risks to
groundwater aside – generates half the greenhouse pollution of coal.

But there's a flip side to this American success story. Even as our
nation is pivoting toward a more sustainable energy future, America's
oil and coal corporations are racing to position the country as the
planet's dirty-energy dealer – supplying the developing world with
cut-rate, high-polluting, climate-damaging fuels. Much like tobacco
companies did in the 1990s – when new taxes, regulations and rising
consumer awareness undercut domestic demand – Big Carbon is turning to
lucrative new markets in booming Asian economies where regulations are
looser. Worse, the White House has quietly championed this dirty-energy
trade.

"The Obama administration wants to be seen as a climate leader, but
there is no source of fossil fuel that it is prepared to leave in the
ground," says Lorne Stockman, research director for Oil Change
International. "Coal, gas, refinery products – crude oil is the last
frontier on this. You want it? We're going to export it."

When the winds kicked up over the Detroit river last spring, city
residents confronted a new toxic hazard: swirling clouds of soot taking
flight from a mysterious black dune piled high along the city's
industrial waterfront. By fall, similar dark clouds were settling over
Chicago's South Side – this time from heaping piles along the Calumet
River. The pollution in both cities made national headlines – and
created a dubious coming-out party for petroleum coke, or "petcoke," a
filthy byproduct of refining gasoline and diesel from Canadian tar-sands
crude. Despite the controversy over Keystone XL – the stalled pipeline
project that would move diluted tar-sands bitumen to refineries on the
Gulf Coast – the Canadian crude is already a large and growing part of
our energy mix. American refineries, primarily in the Midwest, processed
1.65 million barrels a day in 2012 – up 40 percent from 2010.

Converting tar-sands oil into usable fuels requires a huge amount of
energy, and much of the black gunk that's refined out of the crude in
this process ends up as petroleum coke. Petcoke is like concentrated
coal – denser and dirtier than anything that comes out of a mine. It can
be burned just like coal to produce power, but petcoke emits up to 15
percent more climate pollution. (It also contains up to 12 times as much
sulfur, not to mention a slew of heavy metals.) In Canada, the stuff is
largely treated like a waste product; the country has stockpiled nearly
80 million tons of it. Here in the U.S., petcoke is sometimes burned in
coal plants, but it's so filthy that the EPA has stopped issuing any
new licenses for its use as fuel. "Literally, in terms of climate
change," says Stockman, "it's the dirtiest fuel on the planet."

With domestic petcoke consumption plummeting – by nearly half since
Obama took office – American energy companies have seized on the
substance as a coal alternative for export. The market price for petcoke
is about one-third that of coal. According to a State Department
analysis, that makes American-produced petcoke "less expensive,
including the shipping, than China's coal." Petcoke exports have surged
by one-third since 2008, to 33.4 million metric tons; China is now the
top consumer, and demand is exploding. Through the first nine months of
2013, Chinese imports were running 50 percent higher than in 2012.

No surprise: The Koch brothers are in the middle of this market. Koch
Carbon, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, was the owner of the Detroit
dune, since sold off to an international buyer. But it's a third Koch
brother, Billy, who is the petcoke king. William Koch is the CEO of
Oxbow Carbon, which describes itself as "the worldwide leader in
fuel-grade petcoke sourcing and sales" – trading 11 million tons per
year.

With dirty Canadian crude imports on the rise, U.S. refineries have
been retooling to produce even more petcoke. A BP refinery on the
outskirts of Chicago just tripled its coking capacity and is now the
world's second-largest source of the black gunk. But the Promised Land
of petcoke refining is on the Gulf Coast – which is part of why Big Oil
is so hot to complete the Keystone XL pipeline. The Texas and Louisiana
refineries that would process Keystone crude can produce a petcoke pile
the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza every year, which, when burned,
would produce more than 18 million tons of carbon pollution.

Despite the dangers of petcoke, the Obama administration has turned a
blind eye to its proliferation. A 2011 State Department
environmental-impact study of Keystone XL, commissioned under
then-Secretary Hillary Clinton, treated petcoke as if it were an inert
byproduct, and failed to consider its end use as a fuel when calculating
the greenhouse impacts of the pipeline. According to the EPA, that
decision led State to lowball the pipeline's associated emissions by as
much as 30 percent.

In 2013, the post-Hillary State Department revised that assessment,
conceding that petcoke "significantly increases" the emissions
associated with tar sands. However, State punted on the big issue of
climate pollution, maintaining that Keystone XL won't create a net
increase because the Canadian crude would reach Gulf refineries with or
without the pipeline.

A joint letter by Rep. Henry Waxman and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse,
chairs of the Bicameral Task Force on Climate Change, blasted State's
conclusion as "fundamentally flawed" and "contrary to basic economics" –
noting that it would take a new forest the size of West Virginia to
fully offset the carbon emissions Keystone XL would bring to market.